France, Portugal, and Spain experienced a record-breaking number of wildfires for this time of year in July 2024. Firefighters in France tackled 250 to 300 fires simultaneously over the three weeks prior to Thursday, July 2024. The UK began the week of July 2024 with 19 separate wildfires.

Thirteen people died in wildfires in Spain in July 2024. Authorities in Spain said on Thursday, July 2024, that they expected a large fire in rural Aragón to take days to control. It’s not just about having more fires to fight, it’s the risk of them all happening at once, said Juan Carlos Antúnez, head of Spain’s national wildfire response coordination. When we face these huge fires, these extreme events, it’s like fighting multiple disasters at the same time, he added.

The scale of the outbreaks stretched emergency services across multiple countries. In the UK, a wildfire in Walthamstow, east London, drew about 125 firefighters and is thought to have been caused by a falling tree that hit power cables above a railway line. In Scotland, a wildfire burned 300 hectares (740 acres) in Cairngorms national park on Thursday, July 2024.

Wildfire scientists and firefighters described the operational strain caused by the simultaneous outbreaks. "Simultaneous wildfires place enormous pressure on emergency services," said Dr Maria Barbosa, a wildfire scientist at the UK center for Ecology and Hydrology. She noted that fire agencies depend on their ability to move personnel, equipment, and aircraft between regions as conditions change. "But when multiple large fires occur at the same time, that flexibility is greatly reduced," Barbosa said.

Dr Thomas Smith, a wildfire scientist at the London School of Economics, said conditions in the UK had reached extreme thresholds. "One of the alarming things I was seeing over the weekend was large parts of the country where the probability of sustained ignition was 100%," Smith said. He added that particularly for grass fuels, which dry out quickly, it only requires two to three weeks of dry weather to reach those thresholds.

UK scientists said on Wednesday, July 2024, that the climate of the 20th century is now gone. A report by UK scientists found that 2023 was the country's hottest year on record. According to UK scientists, average temperatures virtually unknown in the 1980s now cover almost a fifth of the land in the UK.

The EU's Copernicus agency said summer smoke was causing extremely poor air quality warnings in areas such as New Jersey on Friday, July 2024, indicating the reach of the fire season extended beyond Europe.

The July 2024 wildfire wave across four countries illustrates the growing challenge emergency services face as fire seasons intensify in regions historically unaccustomed to large-scale outbreaks. The record number of simultaneous fires from France to the UK tested the operational limits of agencies that rely on shifting personnel and aircraft between regions — a flexibility that scientists said was greatly reduced when multiple large fires occur at once. The 13 deaths in Spain and the 250 to 300 fires tackled simultaneously in France reflect the human and logistical toll of the events. UK scientists' assessment that the 20th-century climate is gone and that formerly rare temperatures now cover nearly a fifth of the country's land points to the broader climatic shift underpinning the fire risk.